


Love, Changing Tenses

by susiecarter



Category: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, DC Extended Universe
Genre: Developing Friendships, Forgiveness, Grief/Mourning, Guilt, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-07
Updated: 2016-10-07
Packaged: 2018-08-20 02:21:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8232746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/susiecarter/pseuds/susiecarter
Summary: Bruce goes to the funeral as himself for a reason. Not so he can make friends with Mrs. Kent; that part's an accident. And definitely not so he can posthumously fall for Clark Kent, which is an even bigger accident. But it's fine. He can handle it.Until Clark rises from the grave, that is.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [saltedpin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/saltedpin/gifts).



> I couldn't have matched a prompt that suited me better if I'd been trying—thank you so much for your amazing requests, saltedpin! (And of course to the mod for the handmatch. :D ♥) It was so much fun to write this story for you, and I hope you enjoy reading it just as much. A huge thank-you also to my beta [metropolisjournal](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/TKodami), who very kindly and industriously sanded off the roughest edges of this fic; if you still find a splinter catching you here and there, that's 100% on me.
> 
> I also apologize in advance to anyone who actually has first-hand experience with snowplows, because I sure don't. :D Title adapted from the poem [To the Student Who Asked Why He Earned a "C" on an Essay about Love](http://writersalmanac.org/episodes/20160627/).
> 
>  **ETA:** And now with a [gorgeous piece of accompanying art](http://santheum.tumblr.com/post/176817609391/bruce-and-clark-from-love-changing-tenses-by) by the far-too-generous Santheum ([AO3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Santheum/pseuds/Santheum) | [Tumblr](http://santheum.tumblr.com)). Look, admire, reblog! :D

 

 

Bruce goes to the funeral as himself for a reason.

Under other circumstances, it would be foolish to do it that way. Bruce Wayne is inherently recognizable: that's the point of him. All flash, no substance; eye-catching, attention-grabbing. And Bruce Wayne has no excuse for spending a fall afternoon watching dirt get shoveled over Clark Kent's coffin. Kent was a Wayne Entertainment employee, sure, but they only met the once—and it hadn't gone well, either. Bruce Wayne isn't considerate enough to set that kind of thing aside and show up here anyway.

But Bruce goes to the funeral, and he takes no pains to disguise himself at all. After Diana steps away, he stands there a moment longer, looking at Clark's grave in the cool autumn light; and then he turns and carefully catches up with Martha Kent.

It isn't difficult to do. She walks away from her son's funeral with the steady pace of someone carrying something heavy: one step at a time, feet precisely placed. She still reaches the cemetery gate before Bruce does, but is stopped there by a pair of neighbors waiting for her, sober sympathetic faces.

People she knows, Bruce thinks. People she likes. People who knew and loved Clark, who cared about him and were cared about by him—

(All Bruce ever did was fear him, was hate him and hurt him and then watch him die.)

People who belong here, who deserve to have the chance to pay their respects.

Bruce doesn't interrupt.

 

 

He waits instead, quiet, until they've moved away—until Mrs. Kent is alone again, he thinks, and then finds himself barely controlling a flinch.

It was a long flight, after a series of long days. He's tired. That's all.

Mrs. Kent doesn't start walking right away. She stands at the gate instead, wraps a hand around the wrought iron, looks at the ground and breathes; and it's not a good time, Bruce thinks, but there won't be a better one.

"Mrs. Kent," he says gently, and steps forward.

She wipes at her face before she turns toward him, a wan smile already pinned on for another friend or town acquaintance. It's easy to see the moment she realizes she's looking at Bruce Wayne instead. Her eyes widen, and then for an instant she frowns. Not dismay, just puzzlement; but she's a generous woman, and even now, even today, she expends the effort to paper over it.

"I—goodness, excuse me," she says, and clears her throat. "Mr—Wayne, isn't it? What can I do for you?"

 _Tell me where to start to make this easy for you,_ Bruce doesn't say. "I know about your son, Mrs. Kent," he tries instead. "I know what Clark—"

The change that passes over her face is astonishing; she doesn't even have to cut him off, he does that himself out of the sudden awareness that he's said something very wrong. Nothing less would make Mrs. Kent look at him like that.

"Well, I assume you're not looking for money, Mr. Wayne," she says sharply, "seeing as my entire bank account's pocket change to you. So what do you want?"

Ah. "No, nothing like that," Bruce says, "I—I'm sorry." And she doesn't even realize just how much he has to apologize for; but perhaps she'll begin to in a moment. He clears his throat and dares to reach out and touch her wrist, just at the end of the stark black sleeve. "I'm a friend of your son's."

She recognizes the line immediately—though she frowns again, blinks at him twice and then looks him up and down, hearing what Batman said to her come out of Bruce Wayne's mouth.

"No cape this time," she says, after a beat.

"No," Bruce agrees. "Please, Mrs. Kent. I know this isn't a good time—" and she's kind beyond reason to let him get away with the understatement— "but I need to talk to you. It's about Clark."

She stands there and looks at him, face pale and resolute over the sober dark clothes she chose for the task of burying her child. Bruce doesn't know her well enough to guess which side she'd erred on; whether she'd worn something she loved in the hope of some small comfort, or something she hated because she knew she'd never wear these things, never look at them, again.

(The suit he'd worn for Jason's—

The suit he'd worn is back in its garment bag: perfectly pressed, carefully hung; the only thing in that closet, pristine and alone in the dark.

The one Bruce is wearing right now has even odds of ending up next to it.)

And there is urgency here. Bruce would never have imposed on her, today of all days, if there weren't. But looking at her now, he can't bring himself to press; he's opening his mouth to apologize again, to say _I can come back another time_ (fly back to Gotham, fly out here again; but that might cost him less than this conversation will cost Mrs. Kent, and in a far less valuable currency)—

"Well," she says, and twists her mouth in something that doesn't quite become a smile. "If it's about Clark." She turns, almost away, except it's only to take a half-step back so she can take his arm. She pats him lightly on the elbow. "Come with me to the house, then, Mr. Wayne, and we'll talk all you like."

"Mrs. Kent, I—" The thought of being in Clark Kent's space, in his childhood home, after—

Mrs. Kent's face softens, and she sets her hand on Bruce's elbow again and leaves it there. "My door is always open to friends of my son's," she says.

He'd only meant the line as a reminder, as a way of explaining who he was as quickly as possible; it feels like false pretenses now, to have told her a thing like that as though Clark really thought of Bruce that way. But he'd sworn he wouldn't fail Clark again, and doing this right—facing the consequences, not compounding his mistakes—is part of that. He can't do what he's promised without talking to Mrs. Kent. And if she prefers to do that in her own home instead of at the entrance to a graveyard, then that's how it will happen.

"Thank you, Mrs. Kent," Bruce tells her, very low, and they walk out of the cemetery together.

 

 

Once she realizes Bruce has a driver, Mrs. Kent tries to invite Alfred inside. Alfred smiles and thanks her but then shakes his head. "Very sorry to refuse," he tells her quietly, "but I must. There are—preparations to make."

Mrs. Kent raises an eyebrow. "In the car."

"In the car," Alfred agrees, unperturbed, and then dips a shallow bow. "Another time, I hope."

So, in the end, when Bruce follows Mrs. Kent into the farmhouse, he does it alone.

She stops just inside the door, and Bruce immediately pauses on the threshold—is there something out of place? If she's had a break-in, today of all days—

But he doesn't hear anything; there's no chill or breeze inside the house, as there might be from an open or broken window; and, after a moment, all Mrs. Kent does is reach back to press her hand against the wall beside the door and draw in an unsteady breath.

"Don't know what I'm going to do with all this space," she murmurs. "It made sense to keep a room up for Clark when he visited, but it was already getting too damn empty in here—"

She breaks off and puts a hand over her mouth, and for an instant Bruce thinks she's about to cry. But instead she shakes her head once, and then turns and looks at him over her shoulder.

"Oh, I'm sorry," she says, and he realizes belatedly that she's apologizing for the swear. "Not fit for company today. Come in, please."

"Thank you," Bruce says. He'll ignore the rest of it, he thinks; except, as if at a remove, he hears himself add, "You don't have to decide right now."

Mrs. Kent blinks at him. "What?"

"About the room. About your son's—you don't have to decide today. If you'd rather leave it," Bruce says, glancing away.

Not that she needs his permission, Christ; but she's polite enough not to tell him so. "Thank you," she says slowly instead, and she touches the back of his hand before she moves away toward the sofa.

 

 

Bruce sits in the chair across from her, and when she raises her eyebrows and says, "All right, here we are, Mr. Wayne," he does his best to explain. It is, in the abstract, ideal to have Zod's example to point to: a dead Kryptonian, government officials functioning with insufficient oversight, and unscrupulous megalomaniacs with laboratories coming out their ears and far too much time on their hands. Luthor's been put away, but LexCorp itself hasn't gone anywhere; and nature abhors a vacuum of power, influence, and violent disregard for life just as much as the more literal kind, in Bruce's experience.

In practice, Bruce gets as far as "—system of pressure plates and motion sensors to monitor the gravesite—" before Mrs. Kent's increasingly-blank expression suddenly cracks.

"You think—?" she says, loud, startling; and then she breaks off and brings one palm down against the edge of the coffee table, the crack of a slap ringing out, before she balls her hand up into a fist. "These people, god, they can't even leave Clark alone when he's _dead_. You saw it on the TV, didn't you, Mr. Wayne? When they were taking that man away—the things he said about my son—"

Bruce grimaces. Luthor hadn't gone to his holding cell quietly. He'd had a great deal to tell the cameras—which of course had been riveted, breathless, to that sharp sneering face—about devils, corruption, the wholly-deserved deaths of mad gods who'd needed putting down.

Mrs. Kent shakes her head before he can reply. She puts a hand over her mouth again, and this time she is crying, Bruce sees with a jolt, a shine of wetness on the skin beneath her eyes and at the corners of them. "Oh, damn, damn," she says through her fingers, damply, and this time she doesn't bother apologizing. "I always think that's it, I can't possibly cry any more than I already have. And then the waterworks start right back up again."

"It happens like that," Bruce agrees, gently. "For a long time—longer than people think."

Mrs. Kent stops dabbing at her cheeks and looks at him; and then all at once her face changes, the anger gone as quickly as it came, everything falling in an instant into sympathetic lines. "Oh, I'm sorry," she says, and reaches across the coffee table for his hand. "I didn't think—I'm sorry."

For a moment, just a moment, Bruce freezes. And then logic reasserts itself: she doesn't know about Jason. Very few people do, in fact; as a rule, children have never been a prominent part of Bruce Wayne's public image.

Mrs. Kent isn't talking about that. She's talking about Bruce's parents. And the idea that she would, now—that she has concern to spare over a near-stranger's old, old loss when she buried her son not an hour ago—leaves Bruce temporarily speechless.

(Maybe there's something in the water, he thinks distantly. Perhaps he and Alfred should take a soil sample later.)

"I'm the one who should be giving you my condolences, Mrs. Kent," he manages.

Mrs. Kent laughs once, humorless, and squeezes his hand. "Oh, give me a chance to feel bad about something different, will you?" she says, wry, swiping again at her eyes with her free hand. "I know a little about this, Mr. Wayne. I know my heart'll be breaking over Clark for a while yet; and variety does a body good." She squeezes his hand again, tight, and then sniffs and shakes her head, clears her throat. "Now, tell me about—about these monitors of yours. Will you be—opening the coffin, or—"

"No," Bruce says, "no, that won't be necessary," and then, as carefully as he can, he tells her what he has in mind.

 

 

Mrs. Kent listens quietly, nodding here and there, and asks a couple questions—nothing technical, only about the graves nearby, about disturbing the ground.

Bruce answers honestly. If she refuses to give him permission, he'll do it anyway; but he finds he'd rather earn her anger than lie to her face.

In the end, though, neither is necessary. Bruce elaborates on a final detail and then falls silent, and for a moment Mrs. Kent doesn't react: she just sits still, eyes down, face blank.

"Think it over," Bruce offers at last, though something in him chafes at the idea of being slow off the mark—it's easy enough to imagine that even at this moment, even while he's sitting here, some black van full of Luthor's hired hands is casing the cemetery—

"No," Mrs. Kent says, looking up at him, and then she lets out a long breath. "No, I don't need to. Do whatever you have to do, Mr. Wayne, and do it with my blessing as long as it means no one touches Clark." Her voice doesn't shake; she sounds calm, certain, and deeply tired.

She stands, to show him to the door—Bruce almost wants to tell her not to bother, but maybe she does it for the sake of letting herself engage in a normal routine. Maybe she finds it a comfort.

He's about to thank her and step away, push the door open; Alfred must be almost done priming the monitors by now. But then she catches his arm and says, "If you don't mind my asking, Mr. Wayne—how exactly did you meet Clark?"

It feels almost like a trap. Perhaps because it is one, and one that Bruce has been waiting to feel closing around him since the moment Clark died: the moment he realized what he would have to do, that this conversation would have to happen.

Except it's one Bruce has set for himself. Mrs. Kent's face is open, eyes wide and dark and clear—she's not trying to trick him into admitting anything. She's asking him this because she wants to hear something about her son; one of the sweet rare things she doesn't already know, now that Clark isn't here anymore to share them with her.

And she isn't going to like the answer.

(But then he decided already: he'd rather earn her anger than lie.)

"I thought he was a threat," Bruce tells her, and doesn't let himself look away from what happens to her expression, because that would be too much of a mercy. "Before that creature appeared, I—attacked him, Mrs. Kent. I tried to kill him."

He's braced for anything. But Mrs. Kent doesn't slap him, doesn't scream at him and shove him out of the house. She closes her eyes and turns her face away, still as a statue for a long moment; and then she sighs unsteadily.

"Jonathan always thought it would be like that," she says, very low. "He was always worrying. And I took it seriously because he did, because it was Clark, but I don't think I ever quite believed it.

"In my heart I always thought—who could ever be afraid of Clark?" She shakes her head, presses a hand over her mouth; she's crying again, and Bruce feels pinned by it, held fast: surely the last thing she wants is for him to touch her right now, and yet he can't look away. He didn't kill Clark, but only because he'd been interrupted, only because he'd failed to follow through. And if he'd succeeded—this is what would have happened. This is what he would have been responsible for.

(He hadn't thought of Superman as having a mother, as—as being someone's son. Hearing that voice say _Martha_ had stopped Bruce cold simply because that name is carved into his bones, always will be; but it wasn't why he'd lifted the blade away, in the end.

Bruce hadn't thought of Superman as being someone's son. But he had been. And Bruce—

Bruce has had sons, too.)

"He never wanted to hurt anyone," Mrs. Kent is saying, wavering, teary. "He never wanted to hurt _anyone_ —"

"No," Bruce says, and maybe she'll shake him off but maybe it's only right to give her the opportunity to; so he puts a hand on her shoulder. "No, he didn't. He didn't want to hurt me, either. And in the end—in the end he didn't hurt me at all, Mrs. Kent. He saved me."

She drags in a sharp breath, and she still doesn't look up, but she puts one hand over Bruce's.

"He was a good man," Bruce adds, quiet. "The best."

Mrs. Kent remains still for a minute, and Bruce lets her. And then she tilts her head back and sniffs, blinks, meets his eyes and nods. Her hand hasn't moved away from Bruce's—and it feels like theft, like taking a thing he hasn't earned, but he doesn't pull away either.

 

 

Permission obtained, it's a simple enough matter to return to the graveyard. Sunset hasn't given way to twilight yet, which means they don't need to draw attention to themselves with flashlights. There's more equipment Bruce would like to install, of course, but on this first trip he'd only brought the smallest, lightest things, the motion sensors and cameras and vibration monitors.

(Either Mrs. Kent would agree, and he could make as many trips here as he needed to get the full array of gear set up; or she wouldn't, in which case it would be best to limit himself to the least obtrusive tech.)

The dirt is cold, of course, but the ground's not frozen—won't be for another few weeks, Bruce estimates, which should be plenty of time. Lucky for them Luthor had decided to execute this whole plan in late summer, early fall, instead of midwinter.

There's something almost ritualistic about it, Bruce discovers. The half-light, the stillness, no company but Alfred's sober face and familiar silence; giving each set of devices a final check before working them into the earth at Clark Kent's buried head—at his left hand—his right hand—his feet.

(Their positioning can of course be adjusted remotely. But it's best to have human hands to smooth down the soil, to replace the sod over them, and human eyes to inspect the resulting impression in the ground.

It's best, and it—

It feels important. It feels like it needs to be done.)

In the end they do begin to lose the light, but not fast enough to impede them. It's been perhaps forty-five minutes when Alfred says, "I believe that's the last of it, sir," and Bruce—

Bruce can't make himself stand, can't step away from the foot of the grave. "A moment, Alfred," he manages; and Alfred, thank god, takes that precisely the right way and turns, walks away toward the car, without a backward glance or even an inquiring look.

Bruce stays where he is: on one knee, hands still pressed to the cold dark ground, that thin crackling feeling starting to steal over the skin on his palms as the dirt dries. There's only just enough light remaining to let him pick out the shape of the grave in front of him, the mounded rise of it. No gravestone yet; they'll let the ground settle first, Bruce thinks distantly. Just Bruce and a body, and six feet of dirt between.

The sensors hadn't needed go into the grave itself—Bruce and Alfred hadn't disturbed Clark's rest. But Bruce finds himself settling a hand onto the loose dirt anyway, pressing in just a little with the tips of his fingers.

"It shouldn't have been you," he says, to this place where Clark Kent no longer is, to what he left behind when he went. "If someone had to—it shouldn't have been you."

 

 

* * *

 

 

That isn't the end of it, of course. The monitors' readings and the camera feeds are processed in the Cave. Bruce starts out with a simple alert for his phone, with a display visually similar to any of a dozen common reminder apps, set to go off if any readings exceed the parameters he's defined. But that doesn't feel like enough. In the end, he upgrades the encryption used for handling data transfers to his private phone and Alfred's, to allow them to access the information securely from anywhere.

(It should be disturbing. An unpleasant reminder of his failure. But in a strange way, it becomes a comfort to slide his phone out of his jacket, to glance down and see a streaming feed of Clark Kent's untroubled grave.

He won't fail Clark in death. He'd promised it, and he intends to follow through.)

But it's not looking after the dead that causes Bruce the most trouble—that prize goes to the living.

 

 

He and Alfred make a second trip to Smallville to install those pressure plates and sink a few larger monitors a little further away, in case anyone tries to tunnel toward the coffin from the side; and it occurs to Bruce that he's made a foolish omission. Nothing he can't take care of, with some additional equipment—

Except Mrs. Kent categorically refuses to let him install cameras in the house.

He does intend to be—careful, restrained. There's still a kind of shadow hanging over the Kent place; Mrs. Kent's eyes still look sad and tired. Bruce shouldn't be arguing with her and he knows it.

It's just that she's so _stubborn_.

"Mrs. Kent," Bruce tries, "I don't think you realize—"

"No," Mrs. Kent tells him firmly, and then smiles. "But look, you're just in time for lunch."

As if he could be distracted that easily. "Mrs. Kent, that's very kind," he says, "but I didn't come here to—"

Bruce eats two sandwiches and a generous helping of egg salad, and Mrs. Kent doesn't give an inch.

He does his best to strategize before returning to the field of battle; Alfred is startlingly little help. "Bugs, then," Bruce muses. "No cameras, no lasers, no heat sensors. Just audio."

"Admirably restrained of you, Master Wayne," Alfred says, very dry, "but I doubt Mrs. Kent will agree to that, either."

"Biometrics," Bruce tries. Subtle ones, understated; the handles of the front and back doors, the barn, the first-floor windowsills. Surely no one could object to that?

"I suppose, as they say," Alfred murmurs, somewhat less than encouragingly, "it never hurts to ask."

Bruce flies to Kansas again, and does ask; Mrs. Kent sends him away with another firm no and, somehow, a pie.

He isn't sure what's going wrong, why logic isn't enough. Surely she must see the necessity of it—surely she must remember what it was like being kidnapped off the street by Luthor's flunkies, being bound and gagged and having a flamethrower pointed at her. She can't be under the illusion that she's somehow safe in Smallville now, just because Luthor himself is in jail.

Then again, maybe he's thinking too small in any case. The monitors are sufficient to look after Clark, but then he's not going anywhere. Mrs. Kent wasn't kidnapped from the house. She was taken outside the diner, at work. All the security measures in the world at the farm won't guarantee Bruce anything.

The solution is obvious. "She has to move to Metropolis," Bruce tells Alfred. Gotham isn't the right answer, hardly the safe option for an older woman who'd be living alone, except for the times when Batman dropped by. But Metropolis—Metropolis is better, cleaner, easier to live in; and close enough that the distance poses only a minor problem. Much more convenient than Kansas.

Alfred's eyebrows go up. "I am not convinced she will accept that conclusion, sir," he murmurs, after a moment.

Bruce brushes this aside. Mrs. Kent will see reason. She has to.

 

 

They have to perform a little routine maintenance on the monitors; it's hardly even out of their way. Mrs. Kent smiles and lets Bruce in, which has to bode well, surely. And Bruce is prepared, this time: he's got all the arguments anyone could possibly ask for, mustered in rows like soldiers, a whole battle line of them. It _has_ to be enough.

Mrs. Kent listens patiently. She's attentive, meeting Bruce's eyes, nodding thoughtfully here and there, and she lets him lay it all out for her exactly as he'd planned it. After he's finished, she sits quietly for a moment; she must be thinking about it, _must_ be, and she must see there's no reasonable way to refuse—

"No," Mrs. Kent says warmly. "I don't think so," and then she stands, and smiles, and puts her hand on Bruce's elbow. "But you're just in time for supper, Mr. Wayne."

He stares at her. She lets him.

"You were always going to say no," he says. "Why didn't you just—"

"Because then," Mrs. Kent says, "you wouldn't have come inside." She glances down at her watch, and smiles again. "Pot roast should be just about done."

Bruce blinks and takes a half-step back. "What? No, Mrs. Kent, really. Thank you, but I should get back to—"

"Already got two plates out," Mrs. Kent says over her shoulder, calm, as she moves into the kitchen.

"Mrs. Kent—"

"Going to make an old woman eat alone?" Mrs. Kent murmurs.

"No," Bruce says, helpless. A whole new kind of trap is closing on him, he thinks, and again, again, he's done it to himself.

Mrs. Kent beams at him, like—like sunshine; warm, a crackling fire on a cold day, and Bruce stands there and holds his hands out to it, can't stop himself.

(It always feels warm like that, somehow, in this house.)

"Then come and sit down," she says, nodding toward the table.

Last-ditch, Bruce tries an appeal to politeness. "Alfred's waiting in the car."

"Three plates, then," Mrs. Kent says, and reaches up to slide the third one out of the cabinet; and Bruce closes his mouth uselessly and goes to wave Alfred inside.

 

 

The pot roast is excellent, of course. Even Alfred makes a pleased face and has seconds, and his standards have always been significantly higher than Bruce's.

And perhaps Mrs. Kent senses weakness—further weakness, that is. Perhaps she's noticed the slow progressive pattern of it, first the failure to anticipate her refusal and then to make his exit from the house, accepting her invitation and her food and a seat for Alfred, the mistake and then the compounding of it.

Because she pats her mouth with a napkin, and then lowers it back to her lap and says, "You should come by more often, Mr. Wayne."

Bruce steels himself. "Mrs. Kent, I—"

She smiles at him, again, and somehow he finds himself allowing her to cut him off. "Oh, I know you must be a very busy man," she says. "Just—when you have time, when the mood strikes you. I know you've got all those cameras and things to tend to," she adds, "but you know you don't have to wait, don't you?"

"Mrs. Kent?"

She tilts her head, and then reaches out and touches the back of his hand. "If you'd like to come see him sometimes," she murmurs. "You don't need a reason; coming to talk to me like this, or—you don't need a reason."

"Mrs. Kent," Bruce says, but he doesn't have the words to follow it. There's something soft in Mrs. Kent's face; something that shouldn't be there, given what she knows about who he is, what he tried to do to her son. But it is anyway.

"I like to go on Fridays," Mrs. Kent says gently. "If you wanted to join me, Mr. Wayne, that would be all right."

Bruce looks away from her, but catching Alfred's eye is no better: he's watching Bruce, too, with a dark steady stare.

And Alfred—Alfred already knows all the worst things about Bruce anyway, all the ways in which Bruce has failed, all the ways in which he falls short. Mrs. Kent doesn't; but what she does know is enough, and Bruce owes her this confession if he owes it to anyone.

So, in this company if in no other, there is in fact no reason not to say it.

(Now Bruce is almost glad there are no cameras here.)

"I don't have the right," he tells Mrs. Kent, because it's true. "Mrs. Kent, I'm not a friend of your son's, and I never was. I never earned that word from him. I hardly even knew him, in the end. Grief isn't—"

(— _for me_. Grief is a luxury Bruce has no right to.

He'd gone to the funeral, yes—and he'd stood by the tree with Diana, at a distance, and waited there until it was over. That hadn't been for him, and he'd known it.)

"—much for reason," Mrs. Kent says quietly. She still hasn't taken her hand away from Bruce's. "I go on Fridays, now; and if you wanted to join me, Mr. Wayne," she repeats, slow and careful, "that would be all right."

 

 

He does.

 

 

* * *

 

 

He could almost have borne it, if that had been all. If they'd gone to the graveyard together once a week and stood quietly, and then he'd driven Mrs. Kent home and gone on his way—perhaps it would never have gone any further. Perhaps nothing would have come of it.

But that isn't how it happens. Oh, the first time or two, maybe. They talk more than Bruce was expecting; there's no common ground between them except the grave in front of them, and yet Mrs. Kent is kind enough to make an effort. And Bruce can't repay that effort except by doing his best to equal it.

And then, once, he reaches the farm a little late. He's fully prepared to apologize for it, his mouth half-open before he even finishes climbing the front steps; but Mrs. Kent isn't in the house.

She isn't in the yard, either, or out in the flattened fields. She is, as it turns out, in the barn, crouched down beside a sturdy-looking tractor with a tarp only half pulled off it; and as Bruce steps through the door, she slaps a hand against the wheel cover and swears.

He clears his throat.

"Oh, Bruce," she says, and reaches up for the handkerchief covering her hair, sliding it off and shaking her head briskly. "I'm sorry—lost track of time—"

"Something the matter?" he says.

She sighs, and then smiles at him, only a little flat. "Just trying to get everything squared away for winter," she says, and then, with a dark look at the tractor, "but I never had the touch for this damn thing. The thresher, the baler, even Clark's motorcycle—"

Bruce blinks. "Clark had a motorcycle."

Mrs. Kent smiles, and this one is real, full, even if there's something sad lurking at the corners of her mouth. "Oh, yes," she says, "when he was a teenager. Good way to get around out here, he could pay for it himself, and—" She pauses, and then adds more quietly, "And if he'd ever been in an accident, he could say he'd been thrown clear. Easier to explain." She sighs again. "And I could make that little thing purr just fine. But _this_ hunk of junk—" and she flails the handkerchief at the tractor, the selection of wrenches and sockets laid out on the floor beside it, the battered grease gun, "—has never taken a shine to me."

Bruce eyes it. Not likely to be anything in there he's specifically familiar with; and yet it can hardly be _more_ complicated than the Batmobile, can it?

"Mind if I take a look?"

"Oh, be my guest," Mrs. Kent says with a laugh, and then touches Bruce's elbow as she steps toward the door. "Chilly out today—I'll go make you some tea, all right?"

 

 

It takes a little longer than Bruce expects, but not much; long enough that Mrs. Kent does make it back with a thermos and a cup. Bruce is expecting to get the cap, but she pours into that for herself and gives him the gleaming white teacup—and for a moment it's almost like being in the Cave, Alfred bringing something down on bright clean china and then tsking, a stage whisper, when Bruce absently picks it up with grease-black fingers.

"How's it going in there?" Mrs. Kent says.

"Fine, fine," Bruce says, and lets himself smile. "I think I can take it."

Mrs. Kent raises her eyebrows and then looks past him at the tractor. "I don't know, Mr. Wayne," she says, deliberately demure. "It might be above your weight class."

"I never tap out," Bruce tells her.

And he means it as a joke, says it lightly; but something in her face changes anyway, and she gives him a long level look. "No," she says after a moment, "I don't suppose you do."

He does fix the tractor, in the end. And then, of course, Mrs. Kent invites him in to clean off, to wash his hands and face; to have a sandwich, while he's there. She talks to him while he eats, because she wouldn't leave him chewing away in silence. And somehow, inevitable, she turns to stories of the tractor—the tractor, and Clark.

"—and he says, 'Look, Mom!', and then picks the entire damn thing up," Mrs. Kent says, lifting her hands to demonstrate. "Four years old, fattest little face, couldn't keep shoes on him with superglue; but he just hefted one whole end of that tractor off the ground like it was nothing to show me those baby mice." She shakes her head, wondering, and Bruce can't help but smile. "He'd done a couple other things already," she adds, "but nothing that big, good lord. Almost gave me a heart attack, I'll tell you that much."

She doesn't launch into another story right away; a funny kind of quiet steals over them, standing there in the kitchen and thinking of lost things. Bruce finds himself looking away, trying to blink through a sudden stinging in his eyes.

And then Mrs. Kent touches his elbow. "I have pictures, if you'd like to see. Unless you have somewhere to be," she adds, considerate as always. "I don't mean to keep you—"

"No," Bruce says. "I'm in no hurry."

(Alfred stayed in Gotham, this time, to keep an eye on things. It's the work of a moment to send him a notification that Bruce Wayne will be blowing off this afternoon's board meeting.

And the dinner afterward.

And the concert.)

 

 

Getting too involved is not a good idea.

(It has never been a good idea. Bruce has more proof of that than he needs.)

But at the same time, there is a certain utility to it. If Mrs. Kent refuses to allow herself to be remotely monitored, and is equally uninterested in reducing the distance involved, then Bruce needs a reason to keep coming back—to see her, to check on her. It'll allow him to perform maintenance on the equipment at Clark's gravesite at regular intervals. And—

And he'd sworn he wouldn't fail Clark in death. How can he do that when he doesn't even know who Clark was?

He has a thoroughly curated collection of media relating to Superman's public appearances, in a multiplicity of formats; but he hadn't pursued the details of Clark Kent's life with the same vigor. He'd assumed that name, that identity, was little more than a cover for the alien, a comfortable fiction. Superman functioned best appearing out of the blue, saving the day only to disappear again as quickly, and he had to have somewhere to disappear _to_. Bruce had decided that was what Clark Kent was for, and hadn't wasted any time looking closer.

But Mrs. Kent and her house, her stories, motorcycles and baby mice and blue-eyed boys wriggling out of their shoes—all of that says otherwise. Bruce Wayne's relationship to the truth at the heart of Batman is flimsy at best; but Clark Kent was at least as real as Superman. Perhaps even more so.

Bruce has lost himself the opportunity to learn what Clark would have asked of Batman directly, to know without a doubt what standard he should hold himself to. If he's going to have any hope of reconstructing that standard independently, he needs all the evidence that remains available to him.

And there's no better person to provide it than Mrs. Kent.

 

 

(That isn't all. Of course it isn't.

He's selfish, too: it feels like penance, to sit down across the table from Mrs. Kent and hear these things; to face the full knowledge of what he would have taken from her, if he'd gotten his way. It feels like penance, but it isn't, because he _hadn't_. There is, he thinks, a universe where he had—and this universe is the kinder. And it's a gross indulgence to revel so greedily in that knowledge.

But it's also so difficult to stop.)

 

 

Bruce hasn't lost his capacity for objective self-assessment. It's not that the tide sneaks up on him; it's not that the undertow drags him down without warning. He stands on the shore and chooses to walk into the water, chooses not to turn back. It can't be called a surprise that, in time, it closes over his head.

There was always something visceral, physical, about Superman's presence—the way he moved, the strength and the speed, the gaze—that had drawn Bruce's attention. There had been something much too satisfying about having him within arm's reach at last; about facing up against him, matching him blow-for-blow—having watched him fly away a hundred times, a thousand, out of reach, and then finally laying hands on him—

(— _touching_ him—)

Bruce had noted it and then had set it aside. The body was irrational. Its wants could not be reasoned with, but could be ignored. And a want like that—it had no basis in reality, nothing of substance in which to put down roots. It hadn't been a cause for true concern. Superman had been the enemy; the chance that he would observe or—or intuit such a thing, and would try to make use of it in a way Bruce needed to be steeled against, was so miniscule as to best be represented by the notation "zero".

(And Bruce is glad he never permitted himself any trespass, when it comes time to look Martha Kent in the face. Telling a mother who was still grieving her child everything he'd done, everything he'd tried to do, had felt cruel enough without—without defiling Clark's memory that way. Bruce is doing his best to be honest, to make amends; but confessing that particular sin to Mrs. Kent could never have been anything but a mistake. So it's for the best that he doesn't have to.)

But visiting Clark Kent's house is different. Helping Mrs. Kent go through the contents of Clark's room, learning which had been his favorite jacket when he was a boy and how old he'd been when he'd put that streak of Sharpie on the wall; seeing his graduation pictures, his diploma, and reading the college essay where he'd waxed almost painfully earnest about the value of journalism in the modern world; working gradually through the box of hand-written letters Clark had sent home from—from everywhere, from the ports where his fishing trawlers had stopped and from logging camps, from truck stops in the southwestern desert and from, of all places, McMurdo—

It's different. And in the end it adds up to something—something else. Something quieter, deeper. Something that _does_ have roots, tender and pale and thirsty; and the biggest surprise of all is, perhaps, that there's still enough fertile ground left in Bruce for them to sink into.

He feels it happening, and he could stop it. He could rip it all out and salt the earth. Except—

Except he doesn't have to. If anything, it's this that constitutes the rankest self-indulgence of all: but there's no risk posed by giving in to it. There's no risk for Bruce in letting himself. It can't be used against him, not anymore—the worst thing anyone could do to Clark has already been done. This is perhaps the least vulnerable Bruce could ever hope to be, in this particular respect.

No one ever has to know; nothing ever needs to be done. Clark is dead and buried, and it's as safe as it could possibly be to feel this way about him now.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Bruce Wayne doesn't have much in the way of commitments on family-oriented holidays. Diana's gone back to Themyscira to explain things to her sisters, to prepare herself to become Wonder Woman again; Alfred goes where Bruce goes. Neither of them can provide an escape hatch when Mrs. Kent issues her invitation.

And, truthfully, Bruce doesn't want one. He has very little practice, but one of the few truly iron-clad rules that governs Batman is that, with enough time and will applied, no skill or ability is outside his reach—and perhaps that includes kindness. Bruce is trying his best to be kind to Mrs. Kent: and leaving her alone on Thanksgiving would not be kind.

It's begun to snow by late November, in Kansas and Gotham both—it makes all that distance feel almost untraveled, when Bruce and Alfred board their plane through a haze of falling snow and depart it the same way, shuffling through what feels like the same inch collected on the ground.

Mrs. Kent does, of course, try to insist they both sit themselves down and let her worry about the food. But she only wins that fight with Bruce. She's in the last stages of preparation, with very little left to do; but that doesn't stop Alfred from insisting on whisking the gravy.

Mrs. Kent's Thanksgiving spread is fairly classic, as Bruce might have expected: turkey, stuffing, squash, cranberries, bread in soft thick slices with butter, and all of it on what must be the good china. But the last serving dish she brings out is a surprise.

Bruce manages to refrain from commenting, as does Alfred; but no doubt Mrs. Kent can see something in their faces anyway. She smiles at both of them, and there's a warning in it: something strained about it, tense and wavering. And then she sets down the platter of spaghetti and meatballs, and says, "It was the only thing he would eat."

Oh, Bruce thinks.

Mrs. Kent has pressed a hand to her mouth; but she doesn't tear up. She only takes a moment to breathe before she lowers her hand again and clarifies, "When he was—oh, eight or nine, must have been. That whole year, he asked for spaghetti and meatballs just about every chance he got, and he wanted it for Thanksgiving, too. I made it for him the year after," she adds, "just to tease him, and then—I don't know, I didn't stop. I've made it every year since, for him."

This year there was no one to ask her to—but there's no need to remind anyone at this table of that.

"It looks delicious," Alfred says gently, and when it comes time, after they've held hands around the table and Mrs. Kent has said grace, Bruce piles up a generous helping of meatballs on his own plate before he passes the spaghetti dish along.

 

 

They've almost finished up, Mrs. Kent doing her best to press thirds on them and Alfred valiantly refusing, when it happens: Bruce's phone vibrates.

He reaches for it, and would have thought nothing of it, at least for a moment, except that at the exact same time, Alfred does the exact same thing: he breaks off halfway through a word, locks eyes with Bruce, and reaches for his pocket. And both their phones at once—

Bruce unlocks his with sure, steady fingers, warmth and gravy and spaghetti all set aside in favor of a sudden sharp clarity. It must be the grave. He doesn't even read the notification that pops up, just dismisses it and pulls up the video; and, sure enough, there's something moving in the cemetery that isn't falling snow. Bruce doesn't even have to switch to the low-light or infrared views to pick it out.

The anger just about blinds him. He wasn't expecting that, but he knows how to deal with it: he holds himself still, breathes through it, makes himself step outside the feeling and observe it. He's angry, but that isn't all he is—he's also going to do something about it, he's going to put his phone away and get Alfred, explain to Mrs. Kent, get in the car. A step at a time, plan it out—

"Master Wayne," Alfred says quietly, catching Bruce's arm before he can stand. "Master Wayne, look again."

Bruce does; and this time he sees.

 

 

They manage to convince Mrs. Kent to stay behind, because they can't be certain whether it's—

—what it looks like. It could be a mistake, a disguise, a trick. And if they do need to destroy it—she shouldn't have to see that.

It's possible Bruce uses up all the words he has, trying not to say as much; that's certainly what it feels like. He strides through the snow, gets into the car, drives, and it happens in a void, empty of thought: Bruce is, perhaps, already at the cemetery. His body just has to catch up.

It's dark, but that hardly slows them down. The shortest path from the cemetery gate to Clark Kent's grave is one Bruce and Alfred have both walked enough times that they could do it with their eyes shut.

And, in this particular instance, they have a guide: someone is gasping, almost sobbing, scrabbling loudly and without grace at the cold hard dirt—

"Clark," Bruce hears himself say, reaching out, and he's got a hand on Clark's shoulder before he's unceremoniously shoved backwards.

"—get _off_ —"

For an instant, Bruce is thinking _trauma_ , thinking _not fully healed?_ and _half-suffocated_ and _buried alive_. Clark's words are slurred, mushy—a whole stream of them pouring out, and not all of it intelligible; but then Bruce picks out—

"—n't need you. Batman— _hah_."

Of course Clark can identify him. Bruce wonders how: sight? Sound? Smell? Perhaps the combination, something that simply adds up to Bruce when Clark encounters it.

Even when he's apparently the next best thing to drunk.

"Ugh," Clark adds, bleary, and then does something—Bruce can almost pick out the blot of his hands against the snow, now, perhaps trying to push himself up. It doesn't work. He—flops.

Alfred clears his throat. "Ah, sir—"

"Got to be kidding me," Clark mumbles, "th'hell," and then he rolls over in a sudden flail and yanks his feet free of the hole he's left in the ground. One bare—he must have lost a shoe, a sock, on the way up. "The—th'hell'd you do—"

"I didn't do anything to you, Mr. Kent," Bruce says, crisp, and reaches out again for Clark's arm; Clark wobbles up with his free hand raised, but can only manage an ineffective swat. He'd caught Bruce off-guard, with that first shove—his strength only just exceeds what might be expected for a human of his height and age.

And a profoundly uncoordinated one at that.

"—kill me—"

"If I wanted to kill you," Bruce says, "I wouldn't be helping you stand up."

Clark's narrowed eyes aren't more than a glimmer in the darkness; he seems to be taking his time weighing Bruce's words, and Bruce feels a rush of petty frustration. If he'd wanted to kill Clark, he'd have _done_ it—he'd have done it when he had the chance, or he'd have let Zod do it for him and then come back here weeks ago to chop up what was left, just to make sure. Bruce isn't here because he wants Clark dead, Bruce is here because—

Because it's Thanksgiving, and Mrs. Kent had asked. And Bruce is trying to learn to be kind.

"Don't trust you," Clark mumbles, and the truth of it should sting except that he sounds like a sulky child—like that fat-faced four-year-old who'd picked up a tractor. He smacks at Bruce again, and then pauses for a slow breath, a series of blinks—Bruce is close enough to hear his eyelashes click. And then he concedes: "Can't feel m'feet. Can't feel—"

"A truly impressive list of body parts, most likely," Alfred murmurs, at Bruce's elbow. "He's been down there for a very long time, Master Wayne, and the sun—"

"Of course," Bruce says. It's remarkable that Clark managed to dig himself out at all, if he's been so far reduced.

(In lifting Clark's arm around his shoulders, Bruce has an opportunity to touch his hand. Wet, but cold with it: melting snow, not fresh blood. He's still a little bit Superman, then—and considering the kind of damage Clark can withstand at full power, perhaps he only needs to be at a fraction of that to claw his way through six feet of half-frozen ground without injuring himself.)

"I c'n do it," Clark insists.

"His other arm, Alfred."

"S'fine, I got it, I'm—I got it—"

"Yes, Master Wayne."

 

 

Between the two of them, they manage to get Clark to the car. Under the interior light, he looks even more ridiculous than Bruce might have imagined: his hair's caked with dirt, sticking out every which way; his hands and fingers and that one set of bare toes are a stung pink with cold, which he also seems unable to feel; and he's peering suspiciously at Bruce, eyes narrowed and jaw set threateningly, even though he also can't stop listing sideways.

"The hole, sir," Alfred says, once Clark's safely deposited in the back seat.

Bruce nods, ignoring the fierce and somewhat wall-eyed stare boring into the side of his head. "We'll wait." Alfred can do enough in five or ten minutes to stand up to superficial inspection. And no one visiting a graveyard in late November is going to look more closely than that, at least not before Bruce has a chance to come back and properly disguise Clark's ... departure.

He slips into the driver's seat long enough to turn the car on and start blasting the heat, just in case it will help. When he glances into the back again, Clark has sunk helplessly down into the seat; his face is upturned toward the light fixture, but there's a kind of pain or—or thirst, a desperate tension, in the pinch of his mouth, the twist of his frown.

It's not sunlight. It's not enough to help him, too little energy even if it were emitting exactly the right radiation to match a yellow star. For an instant Bruce wants, irrationally, to apologize for it—

And then Clark cracks an eye open and catches sight of Bruce, and immediately starts glaring again. "Jus' _do_ it," he slurs, belligerent.

Bruce tries not to clench his teeth, and after a moment succeeds. "Mr. Kent," he says, as slowly and evenly as he can. "I have no intention of causing you any harm whatsoever. If I did, I would have done it and saved myself the trouble of carrying you over here."

Clark doesn't seem convinced—but he also doesn't seem able to hold his head up any longer, if the way he lets it wobble backward into the seat is any guide. "—won't fool me—"

"No," Bruce says, very dry, "I can see that."

 

 

(He'd expected—

He doesn't know what he'd expected. Dead, Clark had achieved a—a patina of perfection, a distant halo; even Mrs. Kent's stories of Clark's boyish tantrums or teenage sullenness had been told with an edge of wistfulness, in the knowledge that Clark was no longer around to have outbursts of temper or be sullen—his worst attributes rendered as precious as his best by their absence.

Dead, Clark had been easy to admire. Easy to—

—miss. To the degree it was possible to miss him, when Bruce had never really known him while he was alive. And, missing him like that, it had briefly felt all too likely that Bruce would catch sight of Clark and would—would grab for him, helpless with gratitude; would fall to his knees in the dirt and weep out apologies.

But Clark is here, and Bruce isn't incapacitated. Clark looks ridiculous—his _hair_ —and can't sit up straight, let alone stand. He also clearly isn't firing on all cylinders, which has never been an attractive look on anybody. He has plenty of reason to be suspicious of Bruce, Bruce can't argue with that; but it makes no sense to be so fixated on it right now, when Clark is apparently numb from the neck down. Resurrected, Clark has leapt off his pedestal: he's ludicrous and stubborn and frustrating, and it's only been five minutes.

So perhaps nothing will come of Bruce—missing him. Whatever half-formed, deluded, overambitious sentiment he might have been harboring toward Clark in the abstract, it's clearly not going to last in the face of actually interacting with the man himself. Extraterrestrial origins aside, Clark is as human—as annoying, as shortsighted, as difficult to deal with—as anyone.

Perhaps, for once, Bruce's foolish self-indulgence won't exact any particularly substantial price.)

 

 

When the car pulls up, Mrs. Kent is halfway down the steps, snow up to her ankles, a hand pressed to her mouth; but then Bruce gets out and nods to her, to the door, and by the time he and Alfred have wrestled Clark out of the back seat, she's stumbled back up onto the porch on autopilot to hold it open for them.

"God," Bruce hears, as they lug Clark closer, "my god—"

And Clark must look awful, limp as he is; Mrs. Kent didn't get to see him glaring lopsidedly, slurring out half-formed arguments and slapping Bruce feebly in the arm. "He's all right," Bruce says. "He's all right, Mrs. Kent," and then, belatedly, Clark seems to hear: he drags his head up and lurches a half-step entirely under his own steam.

"—'s okay, Mom—"

Whatever it was that had been holding Mrs. Kent in place by the door—shock, surprise, uncertainty—it cracks apart at the sound of Clark's voice. She makes a sharp, loud noise, a half-swallowed sob, and grabs for him; and Clark stumbles a step further and almost falls into her arms.

(Would have, if it weren't for Bruce and Alfred steadying him at the shoulders.)

"Clark," Mrs. Kent says, " _Clark_ ," and then she laughs, or cries, or maybe both, and shakes her head. "Oh—never could keep your shoes on, darling boy," and that's definitely a laugh, Bruce thinks, as she catches sight of Clark's bare foot in the snow. "Inside, inside—oh, Clark, honey, come on; up you go—"

All three of them together get Clark all the way through the door; and then, as if they'd planned it, Bruce and Alfred silently ease back, a single shared glance enough to confirm that they're thinking the same thing. Mrs. Kent should get all the time in the world to hug her son, without having to remember there's anyone else in the room. It's easy to be patient, thinking of it that way. Clark's face is half-buried in Mrs. Kent's shoulder, dirt smudged across his forehead, eyes closed. And, in relaxation and relief, in the promise of warmth and comfort, almost beatific—

(Bruce had allowed himself to become biased, and had known he was doing it. There hadn't been any harm in it: it wasn't as though he'd ever be called to account for his increasingly subjective impressions of what it had felt like to sink a hand into Superman's hair—to press his fingers into the curve of the throat—to see him kneel in the dark, the broad muscled yoke of those shoulders bowed.

Perhaps the hair was thicker, curlier, softer than was plausible; perhaps the throat had become a little too perfect, overlaid with memories of marble, more David's than Clark Kent's. What did it matter? The mind was fallible, undependable. An element of fiction introducing itself was only to be expected.

But here Clark is in front of him again, thoroughly real, and he's—his cheekbones are—)

—not that it matters.

And then Clark's eyes flicker open again and he catches sight of Bruce, and the point is moot.

He pushes halfway out of Mrs. Kent's arms, ignoring the startled sound she makes, and manages to only partly mangle the words: "What're you _doing_ here, you—why're you still—"

"Clark," Mrs. Kent tries, but Bruce isn't going to let her take this hit for him.

"Lex Luthor is in prison, Mr. Kent, but that doesn't make you safe. You're at least as valuable walking around as you were when you were a corpse—especially," Bruce adds, one eyebrow raised, "when you can barely even stand up—"

"And _you're_ th'right person t'help," Clark spits—very expressively, Bruce thinks, for someone who quite possibly can't feel his tongue right now.

"I'm here," Bruce says. "My equipment is here," because not everything set up around the gravesite can be repurposed, but most of it will serve over the short term. "I don't see that you have all that many other options, Mr. Kent, if you want to keep your mother safe while you're still recovering."

Clark narrows his eyes, and manages a whole step forward with only a momentary wobble. "You leave my mother out of this—"

" _Clark_ ," Mrs. Kent says, sharp. "Bruce is here because he was invited—"

"Hah!" Clark says unsteadily. "Hah—'s a trick, or a—some kind of—don't care what. I don't need any help from _him_."

He's saying it to Mrs. Kent, but his gaze is fixed on Bruce; he's lifted a hand, is stabbing an accusatory finger into Bruce's face, even as he starts to lurch closer. He's acting like a complete idiot, Bruce thinks distantly. Letting emotion get in the way of reason, as people so often do. His grudge against Bruce has a solid foundation. But Bruce has already proven that whatever he thinks of Clark, he'll do what it takes to look after Mrs. Kent— _Batman_ has already proven that, and Clark has personal experience with Batman's idea of what it means to commit to a course of action.

Whatever Bruce had or hadn't let himself start to think about Clark while the man was dead, it's clear now that it would never have lasted. Here he is in living color: an idiot. Unreasonable, stubborn, unwilling to look past his immediate and self-centered concerns to see the big picture. A shame—but, given their past history, Bruce supposes they were hardly likely to become friends, let alone—

That's when it happens. As if Clark weren't unsteady enough, he's still only wearing one shoe; when he fumbles himself another step closer to Bruce, he doesn't manage to lift that foot high enough to clear the edge of the rug by the door. Bruce has an instant to catch the look on Clark's face: bewildered, even a little betrayed—the body that's usually so strong, so fast, so reliable, failing him in this single stupid way—and then Clark begins to topple, and—

Bruce is right there. However frustrated he is with Clark, he isn't going to stand there and let Clark fall.

(Not again.)

He hardly even makes the decision. It's half sheer reflex, something moving so fast and so close to him; he jerks and ducks down and reaches out, and then all at once he's got an armful of Superman.

For someone who hasn't eaten in weeks, Clark's distinctly heavy.

Mrs. Kent is only a moment slower than Bruce, hands catching up with Clark's abbreviated descent to settle onto his back, his arm. "Clark!"

"Ow," Clark says, into Bruce's elbow.

They're halfway to the floor already. This once, Bruce chooses the path of least resistance and lets them sink, carefully controlled, the rest of the way down.

"Didn't actually hurt," Clark clarifies. "Still can't feel—anything, really," and then he turns under Bruce's arm, rolling himself over; Bruce is on one knee—

(—hands still pressed to the cold dark ground, that thin crackling feeling starting to steal over the skin on his palms—)

—and Clark is leaning heavily against his thigh, his shin beside it, his chest. Clark is warm, a substantial weight, arms solid and—and muscled, distinctly, under Bruce's hands. That's good, Bruce thinks dimly. Little to no deterioration in his physical condition while dead; no need to worry about atrophy.

Bruce can feel him breathing.

"Can't even feel m'face," Clark admits, squinting at Bruce upside down, and then all at once he cracks a lopsided smile. Sheepish, Bruce evaluates, from the angle of his upside-down eyebrows. That's the right word.

("Stunning" would be—hyperbolic.)

"So, Mr. Kent," Alfred's saying, somewhere far away, "perhaps a little help wouldn't go amiss after all?"

Clark relaxes into Bruce and laughs; Bruce waits, blindly, helplessly, for it to end. "Could be," Clark concedes, voice full of humor, and then—

Then his mother, who's two feet away from Bruce, shakes her head at him and laughs too. Bruce clears his throat, lifts his hands away from Clark's arms, and allows himself to hope that Mrs. Kent was looking at Clark and not at Bruce's face. Feeling—like this—is inexcusable enough without doing it in front of her.

"It's not up to you anyway, honey," Mrs. Kent says, fond and firm. "Last I checked, this was my house. And no," she adds, and glances up to meet Bruce's eyes, "I still don't want any of your—" She waves a hand. "—scanners and things, whatever it is you're planning on—"

"Mrs. Kent," Bruce tries.

"If you want to be sure nothing's going to happen to us," Mrs. Kent says over him, inexorable, "then stay. And don't tell me you've got a meeting, it's Thanksgiving weekend."

"Mrs. Kent, I—"

"I would be happy to take care of any business that should arise in Gotham, sir," Alfred murmurs, unhelpfully.

And Bruce can't deny that something in him settles, hearing it. He couldn't have agreed to leave his city undefended; but he's taken responsibility for Mrs. Kent's safety, too, and—

And Clark's.

(It was only ever supposed to be his corpse that Bruce was standing guard over. But he's alive and he still needs Bruce's help, fumbling and numb and falling down everywhere, hardly in any shape to look after himself. And once Batman's committed to a course of action—)

"Thank you, Alfred," Bruce says aloud, and then, to Mrs. Kent, "I'll take the couch."

 

 

Aside from the convenience of the arrangement for Mrs. Kent, sleeping on the sofa on the first floor positions Bruce closest to the door. He dozes lightly, waking himself at regular intervals; but once Alfred's left with the car, there are no other disturbances—at least not close to the house. Bruce will have to save checking the property line for later.

Though the odds of finding anything meaningful aren't good: it snows all night. Even if anyone poking around was careless enough to leave tracks, those tracks will be covered for them.

But Bruce has responsibilities. Batman is committed.

(He wakes at regular intervals because he has responsibilities. But—

But he wakes at other moments, too: slow, in the soft dark; in the space between two of the timed buzzes of his phone, the quiet so exquisite he imagines he can almost hear each snowflake settling into place on the porch, the roof, the wide flat fields. So exquisite he imagines he can almost hear Clark breathing, a floor away—lying in his childhood bed, in a room Bruce has touched every inch of, and Clark doesn't even know it—or does he? Can he tell where Bruce's hands have been? Does he mind? Or—

Bruce wakes at other moments, too. And then he closes his eyes and lets out a breath and makes himself go back to sleep.)

 

 

The first thing Clark does in the morning is fall down the stairs. The second thing he does is try to shove Bruce away from him—and he's a little stronger than he'd been when he'd first come out of the grave, Bruce thinks. But not quite enough to move Bruce.

"I'm _fine_ —"

"Most likely," Bruce agrees, and continues to run clinical fingers over Clark's ribs, each bone in his hands and arms. "But you still haven't regained full sensation, have you?"

"No," Clark allows. His tone's still a little sulky, but today he can open his eyes all the way: he looks _aware_ in a way he hadn't before. Clear-headed.

"If you had broken something," Bruce says, "you wouldn't be able to feel it."

Not that it's likely. Bruce remembers brushing his hand, snow-not-blood; if Clark could still be damaged by things like staircases, his fingers couldn't have gotten him out of that coffin without paying a steep price.

But Bruce—

—has responsibilities.

"You're fine," he agrees, when he's done checking. And then he looks up, and Clark is looking back. Narrowed eyes, again—except his expression's not quite suspicious, Bruce thinks. There isn't the same tension in his jaw, across his brow, that there had been before. He's staring at Bruce and he looks—wary. But a little curious, too.

(As if he doesn't already know everything he needs to know about Bruce; as if it matters to him, what else he might find out, even after what Bruce did to him—)

Bruce clears his throat and maneuvers Clark's arm across his shoulders, and then carefully heaves Superman up off his mother's floor.

"Told you so," Clark says belatedly. But he doesn't pull his arm back.

 

 

Mrs. Kent is already up, cooking—she'd stepped out of the kitchen at the sound of Clark coming in for a landing, but when she sees that he and Bruce are up and mobile, she smiles and waves them toward the table.

After breakfast, Bruce takes a glance out the windows and then offers to help Mrs. Kent shovel: the snow's piled up pretty impressively, and judging by the driveway, either the town plow hasn't been by or—

"Oh, damn," Mrs. Kent says, interrupting herself, "and I haven't even put the plow on the truck. Meant to do it last week, but I just didn't get around to it. We'll have to shovel a path to the barn first—and you're going to need mittens, Bruce, hang on—"

She moves off toward the front closet, and Bruce resigns himself to the idea of something lumpy and hand-knitted that he's not going to be able to find a way to refuse—that he's going to put on because Mrs. Kent has asked him to, and whether he wants to, whether he'd have done it anyway, will remain safely irrelevant. He shakes his head at himself, just a little, and then looks up and—

Clark is looking at him again. With that same strange expression, weighing and measuring. "She said 'damn'," he says, after a moment.

Bruce raises an eyebrow.

"She doesn't swear around strangers," Clark elaborates. "Not without apologizing, anyway."

Bruce feels almost caught out, even though there's next to nothing to be caught out for—but Mrs. Kent comes back smiling, holding out a bulky pair of green-and-white mittens with a snowflake pattern, and gives Bruce a reason not to reply.

 

 

Clark can't be much help with the actual shoveling. But it's sunny, now that the snowstorm's over; Mrs. Kent bundles him up in blankets, even though he keeps telling her he can't feel the cold anyway, and makes him sit out on the porch in the light. And Clark talks a good game, Bruce thinks, trying to convince Mrs. Kent that there's no need to worry about him. But once he's out on that porch with the sunlight on him, he tilts his head back and closes his eyes and soaks it up like water—

"Bruce?"

Bruce blinks. Mrs. Kent's holding out a shovel, waiting—he takes it, and tries to figure out where to start.

 

 

They clear a path to the barn pretty quickly. Mrs. Kent gets the plow unburied and hooked on the front of the pickup, and then clears the driveway; Bruce finishes up both porches, a path around the house. There's a roof rake in the barn, too—and most of the snow probably would slide off the house by itself, later in the day. But as long as Bruce is here, he might as well.

Clark's gaze is on him for at least half of it. If he still has a problem with Batman looking out for his mother—even in mittens like these—then it's up to him to say so; Bruce doesn't ask. He shovels and scrapes and knocks down a handful of early icicles, and pretends he can't feel Clark trying to bore a hole through him with eye contact alone.

By the time Mrs. Kent is done with the farm's long, sweeping driveway, Bruce has dealt with everything else he can come up with. He almost wishes he could consult with Alfred; vehicular maintenance, he can do, but _household_ maintenance is neither Bruce Wayne's nor Batman's area of expertise. As Mrs. Kent is backing around for one last go, she waves at him from the truck and yells for him to just sit down, she'll only be a minute, and then—

Then he can't ignore Clark anymore.

Clark watches him come up the walk with the same steady attention, unrelenting; he's started to let the blankets flop loose around him. Looking at him out here in a t-shirt and sweatpants almost makes Bruce want to shiver, by proxy. But even when he's not numb all over, Bruce supposes, he probably can't feel the cold.

"Better?" Bruce asks, with a tilt of his chin toward the sun hanging over them.

Clark looks at him with that funny sharp stare for a moment longer, and then away. "I don't know," Clark says. He glances down at his hands and rubs his fingers together. "The numbness is wearing off, and it's—it doesn't hurt? But it feels like—" He gropes for a word. "Static?"

Of course. He's probably not familiar with the sensation; has almost certainly heard the phrase, but has never had any opportunity to understand first-hand what it refers to. "Pins-and-needles," Bruce informs him.

"Huh," Clark says, and rubs his fingers together again. "Weird." And then, without looking away from his hand, "So the thing is, I thought I had you figured out."

"Oh?"

"Yeah. I'd heard about you before that fundraiser, Mr. Wayne. And you were—" Clark glances up, brief and piercing blue, and then shakes his head. "You were exactly what everybody had always said you were. And then I could hear your earpiece, and I saw you poking around Luthor's servers, and—once I saw Batman again, it wasn't that hard to guess.

"It even sort of fit. First you were some kind of—dissipated lush—"

"I prefer 'sybarite'," Bruce murmurs, squinting up at the sun. "Or 'libertine'."

"—and then you were some kind of dissipated lush with a literally violent disregard for anybody but yourself," Clark finishes, unperturbed. "I'll admit you earned a few points back right at the end, saving Mom like that. Whatever agenda you had for trying to kill me, it wasn't the same as letting that thing flatten Metropolis, and you understood that when it mattered. You stepped up.

"And I thought to myself, okay. Batman's a dick—"

Bruce coughs, startled—somehow it's not a word he'd imagined Superman saying.

"—but I can deal with that. He has _some_ sense of perspective. He can be convinced that there are worse things out there than me. Maybe. And then I—woke up, and you were—"

"Still trying to kill you," Bruce fills in, because he hadn't been but he can see what it must have looked like—what Clark must have thought, lying there in the cemetery, with no idea how long it had been, how much had changed, since the last time Batman had been standing over him in the dark.

Clark looks at him silently for a second. "You have to understand," he says more quietly, "it fit. And now you're—you're at my house, Mom calls you by your first name. I saw the leftovers in the fridge. It was Thanksgiving, wasn't it, yesterday? Mom said she'd invited you. She asked you to come for Thanksgiving.

"You put on those awful itchy mittens, you shoveled the porch, you—" Clark gestures helplessly. Bruce sees that the tops of his ears have gone pink; but it can't possibly be sunburn, can it? Maybe it's just a sign that his circulation's improving. "You checked to make sure I hadn't broken any ribs falling down the stairs, even though if I had they'd probably have healed in five seconds anyway. I thought I had you figured out," he repeats, "but I don't see how that could be the same person. I don't—I can't see how that's the same person."

Bruce looks away. Clark will hardly fault him for it—can hardly think less of Bruce than he does already. "I'm not," he hears himself say.

He allows himself a quick glance up, just long enough to catch the furrowing of Clark's brow. "You—"

"I'm not the same person anymore," Bruce says.

(Says—hopes. Prays.)

(Says—lies.)

And then Mrs. Kent turns off the truck, gets out and slams the door and calls, "You really didn't have to, Bruce," and Bruce turns around and smiles; and he doesn't, doesn't, turn back to see whatever look is on Clark's face.

 

 

It doesn't matter whether Clark believes him. Clark is alive, and is going to stay that way; no other outcome is acceptable. Which means Bruce will have every chance in the world to make it as clear as possible that he's sincere.

Beyond that, it doesn't matter. Clark has already decided there is _some_ meaningful utility to Batman: _saving Mom like that_. If he never finds reason to look any closer, if he never finds anything else to see—it doesn't matter. They were never going to—

Clark eases off, after that conversation on the porch. For the rest of the day, his eyes still follow Bruce, but he isn't quite so belligerent; he stops accusing Bruce of unpleasant things.

But he's still frustrating, still stubborn—trying to pretend the endless pins-and-needles isn't bothering him, trying to go up and down the stairs on his own when he still clearly doesn't have any idea where his feet are unless he's looking at them. He doesn't glare as much, but he seems to have traded it out for smiling relentlessly, at Mrs. Kent and even at Bruce. He's in nothing but that t-shirt and sweatpants all day, bright-eyed and dimpling; and now that he isn't yanking away, keeping his distance, he's started _touching_ Bruce all the time—

He makes everything difficult. That's the point. He makes everything difficult, and Bruce is going to be glad when this weekend is over.

 

 

("You were in my room, weren't you?" Clark asks him, after dinner—which is made out of the leftovers from Thanksgiving, Clark giving his mother a soft sad smile when he sees the remaining spaghetti.

Bruce makes eye contact, expression neutral.

"It's not bad," Clark adds, "it's just that now that I'm getting better, I can—it smells like—" and then he winces and looks away and says again, "It's not bad. I was just—"

"Yes," Bruce says, taking mercy on him. "I—helped your mother clean up. We went through some of your things together. At the time, we weren't expecting—"

"No," Clark interrupts, "that's not—I told you, it's okay." He hesitates, and then adds, more gently, "I'm glad there was someone here with her."

The silence after that lasts just long enough to feel almost awkward, and then—

"Less glad," Clark admits, "that she probably showed you the photo albums, too."

He waits for Bruce to jump on the opening; Bruce stays quiet instead, and only when Clark looks up and raises an eyebrow does Bruce say—face blank, tone bland—"Your haircut in high school was really something."

"Oh, god," Clark says, "I knew it," and then he tilts his head back and laughs; and it's—blinding, unbearable, earthshaking, but Bruce doesn't let himself look away.)

 

 

Bruce allows himself to settle into a slightly more forgiving sleep schedule: anyone counting on Clark's infirmity to make things easier for them should have made their attempt already, and anyone comfortable coming for him at his full strength with some Superman-specific device is more likely to wait until Bruce has left.

(Sensors along the property line in all directions, Bruce has decided. Nothing close enough to the house to bother Mrs. Kent—a perfectly reasonable compromise.)

But even when he's permitting himself longer intervals, Clark still can't sneak up on him.

He comes awake in the space between one breath and the next, and for a moment there's nothing but a sharp and superficial clarity: he's aware of every inch of his skin, of the tall dark shadow off to one side of the living room, much too close to the stairs (to Mrs. Kent, to _Clark_ ), and of the coffee table, which he could even from this position catch with an ankle, tip up and flip into the side of that tall dark shadow before it can get any further—

And then all at once the whole scene rewrites itself, and Bruce sighs and for an instant relaxes back into the couch. The shadow's moving the wrong direction; it's not someone sneaking _in_. "Clark, what are you doing?"

"Hey, Bruce," Clark murmurs, and then, after a thoughtful pause, "Thanks for not flipping the coffee table at me."

Bruce clears his throat, and unhooks his ankle from around the leg of the coffee table. "My pleasure. Please go back to bed." Whatever Clark thinks he's doing—whether he heard something somewhere on the property, with his super-senses on their way back, or he just thinks this is a great time to take a walk—he should be resting instead. If it's something important, Bruce will handle it.

"But I wanted to talk to you," Clark says.

Bruce blinks into the dark.

Clark apparently takes his silence as permission. "I didn't mean to put you on the spot or anything, earlier," he adds. "Or—I just—you tried to kill me."

He doesn't even sound angry; just bewildered, unhappy. Bruce lets the words land without interruption or obstruction, stark in the quiet, and then says, "Yes."

"And now," Clark says, "you're—friends with my mom?" Somewhere in the dark, something moves—his hands, maybe, in a gesture of expressive disbelief. "Don't get me wrong, I trust Mom's judgment. But that means something changed, while I was dead." And then, after a brief hesitation: "You—you said you weren't the same person. I just want to know why. I want to understand."

It takes a moment for Bruce to catch up with what Clark is asking; and then he does and almost laughs. Clark thinks it's something _else_ —something he doesn't know about, couldn't, something that happened to Bruce or to Batman while he was sleeping in the ground.

He doesn't realize that what changed Bruce was him.

"I don't suppose 'I had an epiphany' will cover it?" Bruce manages to say instead, his tone more Wayne than not.

Clark huffs a sigh. "Just like that," he says. "Out of the blue."

"I was inspired," Bruce concedes, and then grimaces. It sounds too flippant, the way he's said it. It sounds like a joke—like it didn't rewrite him, like it hadn't shifted his deepest foundations. Batman had been, fundamentally, born out of fear: out of the desire to escape it, and to do that by becoming it. To use it, to turn it into a tool. One of the simplest sensations in the world, being afraid.

At its heart, Bruce supposes that the decision he'd watched Clark make had been just as simple. And Bruce has, in the past, shown a tendency to find simplicity profound.

"Inspired," Clark echoes.

And maybe it's the dark; maybe it's the knowledge that Clark already has no idea what to think of Bruce, that he won't perceive the gaping vulnerability—or will but won't understand what he's seeing. Whatever the reason, Bruce finds that he's able to let himself stand, to step around the coffee table toward the shadow that he knows is Clark.

"Mr. Wayne—"

Clark cuts himself off, breath catching sharply in the back of his throat, when Bruce's hand settles against the back of his neck—unerring, even in the darkness, Bruce much too aware of Clark's height and build, the space he takes up; and that's a confession all its own.

They touch there and there alone, until Bruce leans in to rest his temple against Clark's—and then Clark swallows, Bruce can hear it, and reaches up unsteadily to wrap his hand around Bruce's wrist, and that makes three. "Bruce—?"

Bruce closes his eyes, pressing in—

(just a little with the tips of his fingers. Bruce and a body, and six feet of dirt.)

"It shouldn't have been you," he says—very low, but of course it doesn't matter. This time Clark is right here. This time Clark can hear him. "If someone had to, Clark, it shouldn't have been you."

And then he disengages and steps away. He'd left his coat hooked over the arm of the couch, and for once Mrs. Kent hadn't found it and put it away in the front closet; he catches it up and pulls it over one arm.

"Bruce, wait, what are you—"

"I'd meant to check your mother's property line for signs of anything suspicious," Bruce says easily. "Might as well do it now, since I'm up. Don't worry, Mr. Kent, I'll be back in time for breakfast."

And by now, Clark could most likely catch up if he chose to—he hasn't backslid through the pins-and-needles, he can walk more than two feet without falling down.

But he doesn't do it. And there's no reason why he should, Bruce thinks, stepping out into the snow.

 

 

Breakfast is fine. Bruce acts normal. Clark is watching him again, but then he was doing that yesterday, too. Mrs. Kent doesn't notice anything.

"Got to get the plow hooked up again," she says as she takes their plates, "I never did get to the road around the back field yesterday."

"Of course," Bruce says, because if he can get out of the house and away from Clark for even five minutes—

"I'll help," Clark says.

Bruce meets his eyes across the table: only for an instant, but even that is enough to tell him that Clark knows exactly what he's doing.

Mrs. Kent's plow has two parts, not one. She left the mount on the truck, after they got it hooked up yesterday; it's only the plow blade itself that needs to be put back on. With Bruce alone, Mrs. Kent might have had to back up and realign the truck a few times—easier than moving the blade, which is closer to half a ton than not. But with Clark there—

With Clark there, Bruce is almost unnecessary.

But not quite.

Clark's much better than he was. In response to Mrs. Kent's prodding, he'd admitted over breakfast that his extremities were still kind of tingly, but that seems to be all. His strength is steadily returning to him: when he had first come out of the ground, he hadn't been any stronger than Bruce, but now he can heft the plow blade off the ground and hold it—with some concentration.

It's strange, to see Superman grimacing—however mildly—with effort. And just because Clark can lift the plow blade, that doesn't mean he can see what he's doing.

"Maybe, uh, a little to the left, Mom? Or—"

A sharp clang answers the question of whether Clark's directions were correct, and Bruce is surprised to see him wince; then again, the vibration must be playing merry hell with his nerves, if his hands are still tingling all the time.

"Sorry, honey," Mrs. Kent calls from the front seat, over the growl of the truck. "Does that mean it's time to try my other left?"

"Hold on," Bruce tells her, and then—

He hardly even thinks about it, while he's doing it. It's the easiest thing in the world to drop to the driveway, to slide under the plow blade so he can see where it mounts for himself. He puts a hand on one of the fixtures; and another, unthinkingly, on Clark's. "This way," he says, without making any particular effort to be heard, because Clark will hear him anyway.

It's chilly, Bruce's breath fogging in front of him, the metal of the plow so cold it almost burns. But Clark's fingers are warm.

"Got it?" Mrs. Kent calls.

Bruce clears his throat, drags at Clark's hand until the fixtures slot right into place; it's the work of a moment to slide the bolts home. "Got it," Bruce calls back, and then Mrs. Kent backs carefully away, the plow blade clearing Bruce with ease, scraped steel replaced by flat blue sky and—

And Clark, who's staring down at Bruce with wide eyes. "I could have dropped it," he says; it sounds quiet, with the noise of the truck so abruptly removed.

He's not wrong, Bruce supposes. It—hadn't occurred to Bruce, to worry.

"You wouldn't," Bruce says.

Clark doesn't laugh, doesn't treat it like a joke. They stay just as they are, for a moment that feels endless: Bruce on the ground; Clark kneeling over him looking down, mouth parted; Bruce's palm still warm where it was pressed against Clark's hand—

"Looks good!" Mrs. Kent shouts from across the driveway, giving them a thumbs-up as she climbs back into the truck; and Bruce rolls away from Clark and up off the snowy ground to wave at her, acknowledging.

 

 

(Christ. He'd been a breath away from—

—nothing worth thinking about, with Mrs. Kent right there. _Christ_. After everything she'd done for him, letting him into her home, sharing her son's life with him, inviting him for Thanksgiving, _trusting_ him; after everything _Clark_ has done, just by accepting the possibility that Bruce could have changed—and _that's_ how Bruce is thinking of repaying them? With the second-worst impulse he'd ever had toward Superman?

Christ.)

 

 

Clark corners him in the barn that afternoon. It figures, a part of Bruce is thinking. It just figures, that Clark wouldn't let him get away with it—that Clark would force him to face this, too.

The rest of Bruce is more concerned with the fact that Clark's very deliberately latched the barn door behind him. Given the current state of Bruce's self-control, an enclosed space with Clark in it is not a good idea.

"So being hard to pin down—that's a thing with you, huh?"

"I'm sure I don't know what you mean, Mr. Kent," Bruce says.

Clark looks at him for a long second, gimlet-eyed. "Right," he says, half to himself. "I talked to my mom, Bruce. And she had a—" He stops and shakes his head, brief flash of a smile. "She had a lot of things to say about you."

Bruce grimaces. Good things, no doubt; Mrs. Kent is, as ever, too generous with him.

"And I think I understand better," Clark continues. "Or—I'm starting to."

"Mr. Kent—"

"Call me Clark."

Bruce clears his throat. "Mr. Kent," he says, deliberate, outright rude; but it still doesn't help.

Clark's looking at him with narrowed eyes, stepping further into the barn. "Okay, fine, call me Mr. Kent," he says. "Call me—Daisy Duke, if you want to." He hesitates, and then starts again. "I always thought it was a shame, you know."

"Oh?" Bruce manages, with a reasonable approximation of casual disinterest.

"About Batman," Clark says. "About what he'd done. About Bruce Wayne, before I figured it out—I could tell you weren't as stupid as you tried to make me think. And then you were—you were _Batman_ , you really had figured out that you could do something with yourself if you tried, but you were doing all the wrong things. And you were so—" His ears go pink again, Bruce notices distantly. Not the sun, then. "You didn't have to be like that. I could tell.

"But you didn't want to be convinced. Or—there wasn't time. So—" Clark shrugs a little, helpless, echoing with past unhappiness. "It was a shame."

"I see, Mr. Kent. If that's all—"

"Nope," Clark says, without heat, stepping closer. "Because now I come back, and here you are again, and you're—"

He stops, shakes his head again, tongues at his lip uncertainly; Bruce belatedly makes himself look away.

"I've seen the worst of you," Clark says quietly, at last. "I've seen the—the terrible things, the ugly things. How cruel you can be, when you want to."

Bruce closes his eyes, and doesn't argue.

"And before I died, that was all there was to see. But now I've seen other things, too. I've seen you—wear a suit to Thanksgiving in Kansas, and help my mom shovel the front walk in my old mittens, and—"

"That?" Bruce can't help saying—it's a mistake to engage, to treat anything Clark is saying as though it has any validity whatsoever; but— "I tried to _kill_ you, and you think you can balance that out with—"

"Yeah, by all means, _Batman_ ," Clark says, "tell me more about _my_ skewed sense of proportion."

He's smiling, Bruce sees. He's smiling, and he's—closer than Bruce had realized; too close, one more step will bring him into arm's reach—

Clark takes the step, reaches out. Bruce tries to take a matching step back, but all that does is run him up against the tarped-over bulk of the tractor.

"Knowing all the worst parts isn't good enough," Clark's saying. "I—I want to get to know the rest of you. The part that stuffed the Smallville cemetery full of military-grade motion sensors just to keep an eye on me, and the part that helped my mom clean my room just because she asked. The part that—" and there's no missing the flush this time, easing up Clark's throat; his wide dark eyes, the way he pauses to bite at his mouth. "—that leaned into me in the middle of the night," Clark finishes, low, and he lifts a hand and slides it over Bruce's shoulder, grazes it over the back of Bruce's neck, just the way Bruce had done to him. "God—I know you didn't mean it like that, but there I was, just starting to think maybe I wanted to get along with you, and then you _touched_ me like that and I went back up into that room that smelled like you—"

And he leans in, like Bruce had—but not to press his forehead to Bruce's.

Anything else, Bruce could have countered; could have set aside, to rebuild an appropriate degree of distance in its place. But a kiss—not even stolen, not even Bruce and his helpless greedy longing taking what they can't get any other way; but Clark finding him here and pressing him up against the tractor and just—

Bruce kisses back. How can he not? With everything he's been holding back, all at once let off the chain. He kisses back in a furious, desperate rush, hooking an arm around Clark's neck to hold him in place. As if he could, he thinks distantly; as if even Bruce's most frantic efforts have the least chance of being able to keep Clark from leaving.

(There hadn't been any efforts to make, the day Clark had died. Bruce had been too far away to do a damn thing.

Except watch.)

But, somehow, they do. They do, because Clark doesn't pull away. He could, but he doesn't: he makes a startled noise into Bruce's mouth, hand tightening around the back of Bruce's neck; and then he pushes in closer, crowds Bruce back further, slides his free hand around the small of Bruce's back. One of his curls catches Bruce's knuckle—

(—as he sinks a hand into Superman's hair—presses his fingers into the curve of the throat—forces him to his knees in the dark—)

Bruce jerks away sharply. There's nowhere to go but the side of the tractor—or there wouldn't be, except that even the barest resistance sends Clark back a half-step, hands raised, eyes wide. "Sorry," he says carefully, "sorry, did I—?"

Bruce can't stop looking at his mouth.

"No," Bruce says, "no, of course not," and closes his eyes. "I have to leave."

"What?"

"I have to leave," Bruce says again; it sounds better this time, truer—true enough to let him match actions to words, and duck under Clark's arm toward the barn door.

 

 

This time, Clark follows him.

Bruce supposes it's not a surprise. He's polite about it: he doesn't use the superspeed to cut Bruce off.

"Bruce, just wait a second—just tell me what's wrong—"

"You can lift a snowplow," Bruce says, clomping up the steps and yanking the back door of the farmhouse open. "You've clearly recovered well enough to look after yourself. No need for me to inconvenience your mother any longer."

"What? You're not an _inconvenience_ to Mom, Bruce, you—"

Bruce's coat isn't in the living room; Mrs. Kent's put it away again. His phone is still lying on the coffee table—he'd called Alfred earlier for a status report, which Alfred had duly given before hinting none too subtly that Bruce should leave him alone and enjoy the holiday weekend.

(Bruce knows for a fact there's nothing happening in Gotham that requires his attention. But that isn't the point.)

He ducks down to scoop up the phone, forces the front closet to rattle open and reveal his coat and scarf, and deliberately listens to absolutely none of the things Clark is saying to him loudly from three feet away—until, that is, Bruce opens the front door to find Mrs. Kent coming up the steps, back from plowing. Her head snaps up at the sound of the door, Clark's voice beyond it; and the moment her gaze meets Bruce's is also the moment when, with sudden relentless clarity, Bruce cannot stop himself from hearing Clark say, "—and you kissed me _back_ , Bruce. You can't just do that and then run away!"

For a moment after Clark is finished, no one moves. Bruce forces himself not to flinch away from Mrs. Kent's startled expression—and it's the smallest, silliest thing: a kiss and a kiss back. Mrs. Kent is an adult, and an adult who's most likely familiar with some of the best-publicized stories about what Bruce Wayne gets up to. Compared to that—and compared, for that matter, to a kryptonite spear—this represents the most minor possible trespass.

And yet—

It _is_ a trespass. It's not even that Bruce thinks it; he _feels_ it, on a level so profound that there's nothing he can do about the fierce ashamed heat rising into his face. Mrs. Kent invited him here, trusted him not only with herself but with her son, and Bruce has taken that closeness and turned it into—used it to—

"I'm sorry," he tells Mrs. Kent, "I—" and then he can't think what else to say. There _is_ nothing else to say, no valid excuse.

Mrs. Kent's brow furrows with the barest beginnings of a frown. "Bruce," she says carefully.

He should stay and listen—stand there and hear whatever it is she has to say to him, knowing what she knows. But he finds, with a sudden cold terror, that he can't. He _can't_.

He plunges past her toward the driveway. He's come all the way up the front walk and halfway across the driveway itself when it occurs to him, as though from a very long way away, that Alfred took the car when he left. Mrs. Kent had offered with a smile to drive Bruce back to the airport tomorrow instead—

"Bruce," Clark says, from much closer than Bruce had expected—how does he keep doing that?—and then a warm hand closes around Bruce's wrist.

He stops walking. He doesn't turn around, but Clark doesn't make him.

"Bruce," Clark says again. "It's okay. You didn't do anything wrong."

Bruff huffs out something that's almost a laugh.

"This time," Clark agrees, and his careful tone has acquired an edge of humor. "You didn't do anything wrong this time," and then, the humor swapped for sincerity, "I kissed you first."

"I shouldn't have—" Bruce says, and then his voice betrays him again, dropping out from under him.

"You shouldn't have what?" Clark says, into the pause. "Kissed me back? You wanted to, didn't you?"

As if that _excuses_ it—as if that's not precisely what was wrong with it. Bruce had wanted to; that's exactly why he shouldn't have let himself.

"I shouldn't have," Bruce says again, and this time it's a sentence in itself. "I was here to—you needed help. Your mother didn't invite me to stay so I could—"

"Bruce, Mom didn't invite you to stay because we needed _help_ ," Clark says. "She invited you to stay because she wanted you here." He tugs, gentle, on Bruce's wrist, and at last Bruce does turn around: Clark's face is concerned, careful—and confused. He still doesn't understand.

"I know," Bruce explains to him, very low. "I know. That's—" and he looks down, away, but doesn't let himself stop saying it: "That's the thing I could lose."

"The thing you could—" Clark echoes, and then breaks off.

For a moment there's nothing but silence.

And then Clark slides his hand down Bruce's wrist—around the base of his palm, and then across it, clasping. "Bruce," Clark says. "You can't lose that. You won't."

"I tried to kill you," Bruce reminds him, because somehow he seems to have forgotten. "I tried to kill you, and then I—"

"What? Made out with me in the barn?" Clark shakes his head. "You think Mom could forgive you one of those, but the other one's a bridge too far, and you think the bridge too far is the macking? Bruce—my mom's not going to care about that. My mom is so far beyond caring about that, she—" He breaks off and snorts, laughs aloud. "Look, at the risk of freaking you out, she was the one who had to get _really_ thorough about the birds and the bees with me, to keep me from panicking about being too—um, different."

Bruce looks at him. He's smiling, no shadow apparent in his expression. But it hits Bruce with a pang anyway, to think about it: a teenaged Clark—in the middle of Kansas, no less—afraid that the ways he wants to put his hands on people, the things that wake him up hot and gasping in the middle of the night, are terrible, alien urges no one else will ever understand.

"She's just going to want me to be happy," Clark is saying, and he's—ducking his head a little, sliding his fingers between Bruce's.

He's saying it because it's—relevant. Because—

Because he thinks Bruce might make him happy.

"Come back to the house with me," Clark says.

Bruce swallows, and looks at him. He looks perfect in the cold: eyes just a shade bluer than the winter sky, that curling hair practically ablaze with clear pale sunlight, mouth—

Mouth red, from that minute and a half Bruce spent kissing it.

"Come back to the house with me," Clark says, and Bruce does.

 

 

Mrs. Kent is waiting for them at the table—she almost manages to look like she isn't, Bruce thinks, which is very kind of her.

Clark clears his throat, shifts his weight, and then reaches over and takes Bruce's coat and scarf away again. "So," he says over his shoulder, returning both to the front closet, "you—heard some of that, I guess?"

"Some of it," Mrs. Kent agrees, and then she leans back in her chair and crosses her arms. "I just want to know why it's always the barn, Clark. It's like you're still in high school."

" _Mom_ ," Clark says, but not—it isn't real embarrassment, Bruce thinks, with the easy way he laughs after.

"Come on, come on, this isn't the principal's office," Mrs. Kent adds, waving a hand. "Just a conversation. Come on," she repeats, "sit down."

Bruce moves forward, pulls out a chair; but he can't quite bring himself to take a seat. He'd have preferred the principal's office—he'd have preferred a Wayne Enterprises board meeting, or a dark alley in Gotham at midnight.

(There would be less at stake.)

"Mrs. Kent—"

Mrs. Kent reaches up across the table, wraps her hand around Bruce's where it's still braced on the back of the chair. "Bruce," she says. "I don't want to cross a line here, and I don't want you to do anything that makes you uncomfortable. But I wanted to ask—"

She hesitates.

"Anything," Bruce says, even though she must already know that.

And Mrs. Kent looks at him and tilts her head and then says, "Call me Martha."

Bruce draws a slow breath, lets it out; and then another; and then decides. "Martha," he lets himself say.

Mrs. Kent—Martha—squeezes his hand and smiles. "I do want Clark to be happy," she tells him. "But that's not the only thing that matters to me. Bruce—I want you to be happy, too."

Bruce looks at her. The dining room is full of sunlight, the snow outside glittering with it through the windows. It's always warm like that, in this house. Alfred is in Gotham, and everything is fine. Mrs. Kent is fine, too, safe and comfortable. Clark is alive, and standing next to Bruce, and still, still, holding Bruce's hand.

"I—think I am," Bruce says, and finds himself smiling back.

 

 


End file.
